Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski weren’t on Morning Joe Tuesday morning, but that didn’t stop regular guests from analyzing the news and even having a little fun at President Donald Trump’s expense. One topic that caused laughter was Trump’s recent speech to CPAC.

The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson explained that Trump really isn’t a conservative in the traditional sense during a discussion of the CPAC address, which is Trump’s longest speech to date. Then the conversation became an examination of the speech itself.

“This speech of two hours is sort of the extreme version, but we had seen this before,” AP’s Jonathan Lemire said. “In fact, I was talking to someone in Trump’s orbit in the last day or so who predicted this speech, that after a week of real defeat for this President, the public relations defeat with the Cohen testimony and then, obviously, the failure to reach an agreement in Vietnam, that he needed an outlet.”

“He needed some sort of release,” Lemire said. “We’ve seen this where he’s – the infamous speech to the boy scouts during that first summer, which came amid the health care falling apart, the Republican healthcare plan. Particularly when given a friendly audience, which this one certainly was and they responded to everything he did, including that flag hold. He’s riled up. He needs that feedback from the base and needs that release, and that’s what this speech was, in some way setting himself to go forward.”

“And yes, we can raise questions, should a president’s temperament really need that? That’s a fair inquiry, but this is something very much of the pace of Donald Trump. This is short of how he gains energy, is finding this base. And It reflects, then, why so much of what he aims, his policy and rhetoric, is back at that very base.”

MSNBC contributor Mike Barnicle had a less generous take on Trump’s speech.

“I would submit that if you went to that speech, got the tape of it, clipped out the introduction that he’s the President of the United States, you would look at it as if, uh-oh. Thankfully, you’ve a guy doing the act out here who’s fully clothed,” Barnicle said.

“He’s not wearing paper slippers,” Barnicle said. “He’s clearly a mental patient and someone in his family had better hopefully come on stage and take him off. I mean, it’s that crazy. The length of it, the sustained assault on common sense, going back to crowd sizes and things like that.”

“But, Mike, the crowd eats it up and he is sustained by that,” co-host Willie Geist said.

“That is a crowd that applauded the death of John McCain,” Barnicle said.